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The FBI closed my town’s observatory in the 1970’s.
When I was a kid me and my family lived in a very isolated small town called Jeremy’s Coffin, in the innards of Pennsylvania. You won’t find it in Google Maps or in any map at all. The city’s name has changed some fifteen years ago, and sincerely, I’d rather die than going back there. Sadly, I think I’ll have to. I write this not as a testament, but more as a confession of my past sins, which all came back to doom me and my family. I just hope we survive the deadly and feasible implications of my negligence. My name is Abraham Sehen, and I was born in the aforementioned town of Jeremy’s Coffin in the year of 1953. My father, Isaac Sehen, was a astronomy teacher, and he worked in the local observatory, which was the sole reason for the existence of our small city. My mother, Sasha Sehen, was a housewife, but she was graduated on finances. She just didn’t like to work, I think. Jeremy’s Coffin is a strange name for a city, but it made sense on the context. Jeremy Sailor-Head was a nineteenth century famous engineer who had an enormous estate there, before the city was built. He had a special passion for the stars, and created an enormous particular observatory inside his property. Also had an entire forest, a lake, tons of buildings, and a personal library. Sadly, Jeremy never had any children, and died when he fell from the observatory’s spiral stairs at age thirty-six. Because nobody legally owned the lot when it happened, his former employees literally settled around the place, and quickly a small city grew along Jeremy’s Coffin. All buildings were invaded by the new residents, all of them but the observatory, which remained closed for years. In 1922, the city of Jeremy’s Coffin was formally created, and the observatory was nationalized and re-opened by the new mayor in the following year. It wasn’t by any means the best or the most advanced observatory even in Pennsylvania, but it was important for the inhabitants because of it’s historical and cultural value, and a few tourists even came to visit it every now and then. In 1946, my father was employed as one of the lead scientists of the observatory. I don’t know in which projects he worked exactly or what they researched there, he never told me. I only know that almost every month the local school made a field trip there and he gave lessons on astronomy. As a child I had some of those lessons, and I remember how excited I got knowing that my father was the almighty scientist teaching us all those amazing factoids about the sky. Well, Jeremy’s Coffin wasn’t exactly a big city. In fact, we had only about 20.000 citizens by the sixties, and only my father and three other scientists and one janitor worked in the observatory. And as every small town, we had our fair share of eerie stories. I know it seems off-topic, but you’ll need to know all context before I delve into my personal story. In my youth, I had a bit of interest on the paranormal. Not only me, but my friends as well. On the vacations, we would meet in my friend Carl’s ranch next to the city’s lake and tell ghost stories. Obviously, most of our stories were made up, but sometimes our parents would join us and tell their stories too. And holy shit, their stories were really scary. Probably false, but scary. We were just kids trying to create horror tales, they were grown ups that had been through a lot and knew how to scare. I must had been around ten or eleven years old when this happened. After I got so freaked out by a story told by my friend Lala’s mother that I peed on my bed, I decided that I’d learn how to scare too. Look, I’ve never had been a huge fan of reading before this event, but I’ve had been to the old library a couple of times because I needed to research for my homeworks, and I remembered that there was a session on the library that I’d never go. The “Dark Zone”. Jeremy Sailor-Head had interest in occultism, parapsychology, and bizarreness in general. His books were still there, even more than fifty years later, and nobody dared to rent something from there. At least not openly. I entered the library and went there. The session was as dusty and dirty as it was empty. I doubted if they had ever cleaned it since Jeremy died. Ironically, I became addicted to the old creepy books. Maleus Malefikarum, the Goetia, the Codex Gigas, there were copies of several pieces of bizarre literature there. Soon my afternoons turned to researching forbidden knowledge and learning some Latin. Carl Joffrey, my friend who belonged to the family who owned the ranch, soon joined me in my explorations, and we kept reading there every day for a few months. Until we decided to try a ritual by ourselves. We were both twelve, and after one year or too secretly learning occultism, we thought we were already expert magicians. Oh, how dumb we were. We decided to talk to Jeremy Sailor-Head. It was a saturday evening, and the place wouldn’t open on weekends at the time. We secretly entered the observatory using a key I had stolen from my father, turned on the lights and went up to the place where the founder had accidentally fallen from the stairs, and prepared ourselves with some purification rituals and prayers. Soon we were ready. We carefully put the Ouija board we brought on one of the steps and began the whole thing. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, it was a very long time ago, but I remember that after some good fifteen minutes without answers, we were greeted by an entity that called itself “The Gravedigger”. “Hello. I’m The Graveddiger. I’ll answer three questions peacefully. If you want another one, I’ll take something in return.” Obviously that scared the shit out of us. I even suspected that Carl was messing with me, but he seemed quite scared too. We exchanged looks, and “decided” with a nod that he’d make the first question. “Are you a spirit, a ghost?” He asked, trembling. “NO.” “Are you Jeremy Sailor-Head?” Carl questioned. “NO.” We were about to make another question, but we saw the thing moving toward the words by itself. Also, I remember in this exact moment the lights started flickering. “But he died because of me.” I thought of getting up and running away, but I was too scared to do anything. Carl’s voice was stammering, but somehow he had the guts to ask his final question: “Why did you murder him?” “I didn’t. He killed himself.” “You convinced him to kill himself?” Carl realized he had made a fourth question and his face became completely pale. “I am... I’m so sorry Abe...” He muttered to me. The air got very, very cold, and the lights turned off completely. Except one. The shining moonlight that came from the huge telescope on the upper end of the stairs. I stood still, paralyzed by the fear, as he climbed up the stairs without saying anything and looked through the telescope. That was the loudest scream I have ever heard. Carl climbed down the stair running as if evil itself was behind him, and even with my screams trying to calm him down and with no light at all, he continued. He stumbled on the Ouija board and... Well, you guess it, he... He fell down from eleven and a half feet and hit his head very hard on the floor. Immediately after the accident, the lights turned on, and I carefully climbed down the stairs and went to where he landed. The Ouija board was right to his side, and a small amount of blood had covered the “YES”. Obviously Carl wasn’t well, and I’m not in any way trying to justify what I did. But please know that I was just a child that thought I could play with something FAR beyond my comprehension. I thought that if I stayed there or tried to help my dad would forbid me of going to the library or talking to Carl or even going to the observatory again. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran away as fast as I could, locked myself in my room and hid under the bed’s blankets. I only woke up at noon on the following day. My parents asked me about Carl, and I had to lie that I didn’t know where he was. Turns out he never went home, and his parents were knocking on all his friends’ doors searching for him or information. Guilt corroded me, but I managed to hide what I had done the previous day. I stayed most of that Sunday in my room, praying for him to be well. Carl was found when my father and his co-workers entered the observatory on Monday’s morning. Still alive, but unconscious, and with several exposed fractures, including one in his spine. He was taken to a hospital in Philadelphia and was kept there for months. He never walked again. I was scared he was angry at me and didn’t want to see him, but my mother took me anyways on Wednesday. My friend was completely covered in plaster, could only move his head and left arm, and had a very visible scar that commenced on his forehead and went down to his chin, passing through a eye (Which also was “removed” in the accident.) But if that wasn’t enough, his brain suffered an extremely serious trauma, that almost completely incapacitated his ability to talk. He couldn’t formulate full sentences anymore. “I’m so sorry, Carl.” I muttered to him when my parents went to grab a coffee with theirs a few minutes after I entered the room. He grabbed my arm firmly, and with tears falling from his only eyes, he whispered: “Kill.” He pointed at himself. I looked him in the eye. Despair. Fear. Bleakness. Pure horror. I could only see those emotions on his eyes. That single look scared me more than everything that happened before. Carl didn’t want to die because of his new condition. Or because he feared the “Gravedigger”. What he saw on that telescope scared him forever, so much that dying was the only way of fleeing from whatever he’d seen. I didn’t kill him. I tried to tell him that all would be ok. But I knew it wouldn’t. I never saw Carl again after that. The next Friday he finally got able to use his other arm again, and he grabbed a pen and plucked his remaining eye out, before he penetrated his forehead with it so hard that they only removed it with surgery. The doctors saved him, but Carl basically gave himself anencephaly. He died two or three years later when a rat decided to live in his innards and ate his functional organs. This occurrence made me immediately lose all interest I had in the occult. In fact, I grabbed all my magic diaries, Ouija boards, amulets and things related to occultism and buried it all in a box on my backyard. I started consulting myself with a psychologist and acquired a severe fobia of the observatory. Even talking about it sent chills down my spine. Needless to say my relationship with my father was severely affected. He always talked about astronomy. Seeing him reminded me of the observatory. Several years later me and my therapist started an specific treatment to eliminate my fear from the observatory, which got so critical that even looking to the sky was making me cry in fear. I began to confront my fears by studying astronomy. I ended up becoming a man of science, and going every time I could to the observatory with my dad and looking at the stars with the telescope. My memories of Carl, occultism, The Gravedigger, and the stars were repressed, and I somehow ended up forgetting everything. Carl was a childhood suicidal friend who went to the observatory to kill himself. I once had an interest on magic or something, but magic didn’t exist. The only thing that I believed now was science. And I didn’t even know what a Ouija board was anymore. At age seventeen I went to study astronomy in New York, and a few years later, was officially an astronomer. My father easily arranged for me to have an internship in Jeremy’s Coffin, and of course, I went there to work with him. The observatory was no longer in any way a spooky place, but a house of cosmic contemplation and science. We even frequently joked about the two tragedies that unfolded there. We jokingly called the spiral stairs “THE SPIRAL STAIRS OF DOOM”. One or two years after I was officially hired as a member of the observatory, the janitor succumbed to old age (He was at least 70 years old) and we began doing the cleanup ourselves ‘cause we were affording to buy some new equipments or something, I don’t remember very well. What I do remember are the events that happened on the twelfth of august of 1977. It was 6 PM, our work shift was done, and me and my father were turning the equipments off and preparing to leave, when two of the other scientists, Spencer Collins and Victor Gustafson, decided they’d turn on the huge television we had on the main room and eat some barbecue. It wasn’t atypical of them. Victor and Spencer did that every weekend. They invited us, and my father agreed to join them, but I got charged with cleaning everything that day because one of the other scientists was traveling to Italy, and was too tired. I ended up going home. Two or three hours later my father called home. My mother picked up the phone and gave it to me. Dad told me to get some beer for them on the nearby supermarket because they had found a fun red board they were playing with or something. I didn’t correlate the things at first. I wish I had. I wish I had told them to stop playing and leave the fucking place immediately. But my memories of what happened were buried for nearly ten years. It all happened in less than fifteen minutes. I went to the nearby supermarket, bought two packs of beer, walked to the observatory, and entered. I was greeted by a vision of Spencer and my dad trying to immobilize Gustafson. The poor man was trying to stab his own eyes with the steak knife they used on the barbecue. In front of the TV lied the Ouija board. And then all memories that I had carefully repressed for so long came back to my mind. “Please, let me die! Please! I don’t want to see it anymore!” He screamed in horror. “Abraham, come here, help us!” My father screamed, clearly struggling to hold his colleague. It was a weird sight. Victor Gustafson was always very skinny, short and at that moment was barely 60 kg, while my father and Spencer were both a bit fat and significantly taller than him. Yet, he was clearly about to outmatch them. I dropped the beers and went to help them. “Did he use the telescope?” I asked, shivering and hurrying to where they were. My father simply nodded, still not fully comprehending what was happening. Whatever had killed Carl years ago and Jeremy decades ago was back. Whatever it was, it waited for years, without attracting any attention, and then striked. It waited for the time when I’d have completely forgotten it. Memories came to my mind from all the years I had worked there. The Gravedigger had always been there. All my life. Even my years in New York, he was right at my side, stalking me and observing. That day, so many years ago, I was supposed to die. But I fled. “Calm down Victor!” I shouted, as I joined efforts with my father and my colleague. I looked into his eyes. The same look that I saw on Carl’s eyes that tormented me for so long was there. He had seen The Gravedigger in all it’s dreadful glory. Like Jeremy Sailor-Head. Like Carl Joffrey. This terrified me so much that I for a moment hesitated, and Gustafson freed himself, severing his hand in a brutal move and kicking me and my father away, before cutting his stomach and letting his bowels fall to the floor in a gory mess. “Oh my God, Abraham, call an ambulance, please!” My father screamed, as he removed his own coat and tried to use it to stop Spencer’s bleeding. I ran to the observatory’s telephone and immediately called the emergency services. “911, what emergency services you require?” “I need an ambulance! There are two people very wounded in the observatory!” “Calm down, Sir. Where are you right now? Was physical violence invol-“ All lights on the building turned off, and the phone did it as well. “It’s all your fucking fault, Abraham... We talked with Carl. You knew about The Gravedigger. You always knew...” Spencer muttered even tough he was clearly losing his consciousness. “Shut up, Collins! Blame yourself for playing with ghosts like it was nothing!” Dad said. I saw he was having a hard time breathing. The kicks had probably fractured one or two ribs. “Dad... Did you look through the telescope?” I asked. “No, I didn’t. Neither did Collins. Just Gustafson here did.” “Ok. Please, do not look through it. Help Spencer, I’ll call for help.” I asked and left, running to ask for help on the town. A few minutes later I was back in the observatory with two police officers, an ambulance and two or three helping peasants. I don’t remember exactly where I went for help, I was so worried that I couldn’t even think right about it. But when I got back, my dad was pale. Even more than before. The police was already talking to him, so I couldn’t say anything, but I was able to exchange looks with his eyes before he entered with Spencer in the ambulance. Why. Why the fuck did he look through the telescope while I went to ask for help? I tried to go to the hospital where they were being taken, but the police handcuffed me and brought me to testify on the police station. I was covered in blood and was the only one who wasn’t hurt after all. I spent several hours answering questions there, when the news arrived. Dad had cut his throat with a broken piece of the mirror in the hospital room. When I arrived in the hospital, he was already dead. What happened next hurt me so much that I don’t want to write much about it. Dad’s suicide had broken my mom, and she ended up having severe psychological problems after it. A few months later, she joined a weird Christian cult and moved to Guyana. Never saw her again after that. I never went back to that motherfucking observatory, neither did Spencer Collins, who in fact, I’ve never heard of again since he left the hospital. The scientist who was traveling, Frederick Puller, kind of became the only astronomer working there when he came back. He tried to contact me to come back or even hire new people from outside the town, but he wasn’t successful, and ended up working alone there. Nobody wanted to work in that dreadful place. And soon nobody was working there. Freddie (how we called him back there) was found hanging two or three months later. I had already moved away to New York, but my mom was still living in Jeremy’s Coffin. She told me that the state had formally closed the observatory after the last death, but the FBI investigated the whole matter and there were always one or two agents standing on the building’s door. Men in black literally roamed the streets for months. And things only got weirder. People started to disappear, and the city acquired such a bad reputation that it’s name had to be changed. And honestly I never cared about the new name. I never forgot what happened, but got over it. I started teaching science to high schoolers, and ended up marrying one of my former university colleagues who had become an professor, Sarah Wershel. We had one kid, Maxwell Wershel Sehen. He’s the reason I’m registering all of this. Once again, when I had almost forgotten about him, The Gravedigger striked where I was most vulnerable. Throughout Maxwell’s early childhood, I was still not fully over what happened. In fact, I’ve never been. I had a drinking habit that I finally got over a few years ago. I never got violent with him or my wife, but I could be quite sincere sometimes, and even if I can’t fully remember it, sometimes I’d let the secrets of Jeremy’s Coffin slip through my lips. Maxwell soon knew about the Gravedigger, and all deaths that surrounded my former life. Sarah, as you can imagine, wasn’t amused by my chit chatting about those events with a child. With her help I battled and defeated my alcohol addiction, but the damage was already done. Maxwell grew up knowing that something weird happened back there, but not knowing what exactly or what was The Gravedigger. And I can’t blame him. I still don’t know what the Gravedigger is or what he wants. As my wife ordered, I never talked with him openly about those occurrences. I did wrong. By not talking about how despairing my hometown events were to me, I allowed him to go and try to discover them by himself. Maxwell, together with a few friends from his university, decided to get a camera and go there urban exploring. I tried to stop them from doing it, but they were already too curious and calling me paranoid. I’m on a bus that’s headed to Jeremy’s Coffin right now. Or what’s left of it. The city looks like a fucking ghost town and most of it is now old and decaying. I don’t know if I’ll be able to save Maxwell and his friends, and I doubt I can arrive in the observatory before them. They left at least one hour and a half before I got into the bus. I don’t know if I will survive. But please, like suicide and drug addiction, these kind of paranormal things must be discussed. Forgetting the past or ignoring it allows it to happen again. I’ve committed this error twice. This is the main reason I wrote all of this. If it happens with you or in your family, don’t bury the memory. Talk about it, even if it hurts. There’s no way it’ll surprise you if you do it. Category:Fanfic Category:Creepypasta